Graphics engine rewritten

Videosync now has a new graphics engine that gives you heavily improved rendering performance and frame rate stability. We want to go as far as saying that you can now do a pretty decent video show on a Mac without a dedicated graphics card.

Control Window

A beautiful new companion window combines the previous Output Settings window with a console that communicates error messages and gives you feedback about your own development efforts, specifically in service of the Plugin SDK.

Plugin SDK

Videosync now allows you to build your own video plugins. Head over to the Plugin SDK manual to learn how you now have endless freedom creating unique video instruments and effects if you are willing to start experimenting with Max For Live and GL shader language.

The SDK is based on the ubiquitous ISF standard, providing the means to build your own interface around any existing ISF plugin and directly use it musically inside Ableton Live.

The ISF integration covers the full standard, including multiple passes for feedback-type effects as well as image inputs, supplying the image results of other tracks as side chain inputs that can modify every individual pixel in any way you can imagine.

Other fixes and additions

Apart from these headliners, we made the following changes:

Modulators are now deprecated. The way they worked didn’t really align with the workflow of Live and we suspect that is the reason the no-one really used them. We are currently thinking about the best way to re-introduce frame-accurate modulation so all your input is welcome.

The Monitor plugin is renamed to Status and the Extender plugin is renamed to Properties.

When using an alternative render size (by unlinking Draw Size from window size, for example to accommodate a fixed-resolution Syphon output), the image shown in the output window now scales to fit instead of stretching to the full output size.

The mouse cursor now hides after a short time when leaving it idle over the output window.

Compatibility with older sets

As always your old sets will continue to work without any modification since the older plugins of previous Videosync versions are all still supported. You can choose to migrate your existing sets to the latest versions whenever it is convenient.